TURKIC LITERATURE – Early Modern Period

HUMANITIES INSTITUTE Prof. Talat S Halman TURKIC LITERATURE – Early Modern Period OTTOMAN LITERATURE Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman state had a life span of more than six centuries, from (1299 to 1922). A single dynasty reigned in unbroken continuity. Islam was not only the religious faith, but also the political ideology of the basically theocratic Ottoman state. The empire was multiracial, multinational, multireligious, multilingual. In ruling over these disparate elements, the Ottoman establishment achieved remarkable success in administrative, military, and fiscal organization. Overview. Ottoman literature, which stressed poetry as the superior art, utilized the form and the aeshetic values of Islamic Arabo-Persian literature. The educated elite, led by the sultans (many of whom were accomplished poets themselves), produced a huge body of verse whose hallmarks included refined diction, abstruse vocabulary, euphony, romantic agony, and dedication to formalism and tradition, and the Sufi brand of mysticism. Although prose was not held in high esteem by the Ottoman literary establishment, accounts for some excellent achievements, particularly the travelogues of the seventeenth-century cultural commentator Evliya Çelebi. The Ottoman Empire also nurtured a rich theatrical tradition, which consisted of Karagöz (shadow plays), Meddah (storyteller and impersonator), and Orta oyunu(a type of commedia dell’arte). Traditions. Three main literary traditions evolved: 1) Tekke (sect,denomination) literature; 2) Oral folk literature; 3) Divan (elite) literature. Oral folk literature and Divan literature hardly ever influenced each other; in fact, they remained oblivious of one another. Tekke literature, however, had an easy intercoursewith both, utilizing their forms, prosody, vocabulary, and stylistic devices in a pragmatic fashion. OTTOMAN POETRY Contents Divan Poetry Religious Poetry Part I : DIVAN POETRY Position of Poetry. The Ottoman elite was passionately devoted to poetry. Perhaps the crowning achievement of Ottoman culture was poetry, which also served as the propaedeutic to all other literary arts and as an element of visual and plastic arts like calligraphy, architecture, and miniature painting as well as of the decorative arts. Divan poetry, as the Turkish elite poetry that was influenced by Arabic and Persian literature is often called, found favor at the court and at the coffeehouse, it satisfied the aesthetic needs of both the elite and the man in the street. Significantly, two thirds of the sultans were poets—some, in particularly Mehmed “the Conqueror” (1432-81) and Süleyman the Magnificent (1494-1566),were first rate. Elite Poetry. Divan poetry was composed by and for an intellectual elite mostly affiliated with the court. Most of the prominent poets received a theological education at a medrese (Muslim academy) where instruction was given in Arabic and Persian, both considered a sine qua non for a man of letters. The Ottoman poets as a rule viewed it the epitome of literary achievement to publish a collection of poems in one of these two languages─or preferably in both. Fuzuli (d.1556),ranked among the two or three greatest classical poets,wrote three divans (collections of poems)—in Turkish,Arabic, and Persian. Influences. From beginning to end, classical poetry remained under the pervasive influence of Persian and Arabic poetry: it imitated and tried to emulate the verse forms, rhyme-and-rhythm patterns, meters, mythology, and even Weltanschauung of the Persian and Arabic masters. It also adopted a substantial portion of their vocabulary. Prosody. Aruz (Arabic: arud), a quantitative prosody devised by the Arabs and perfected by the Persians, dominated Divan poetry. This metric form is based on the arrangement of syllables according to vowel length and consonantal ending. Each short vowel at the end of a syllable accounts for a short sound (.). A syllable ending in a consonant or a long vowel is taken as a long sound (–)The meter of one famous line would thus be: Â-şık ol-dur kim kı-lar câ-nın fe-dâ câ-nâ-nı-na In this complaint by Fuzuli, that “The lover is he who sacrifices his life to his loved one,”the meter as it stands is one of the most frequently used. The name of the meter is Fâilâtün / fâilâtün / fâilâtün / fâilün, which reproduces the sound pattern. The final k of âşık is linked with the word oldur and the final syllable of the line, as in the case of all meters, is automatically accepted as long even though it ends in a short vowel. The poet could choose from about a hundred different meters. Incompability. This prosodic structure was essentially ill suited to Turkish phonology. Aruz meters have a preponderance of long syllables, whereas Turkish makes frequent use of short vowels. Three successive short syllables, for instance, can be used only at the end of just a few meters, and no meter can accommodate four successive short syllables. (The name “A-na-do-lu,” meaning Anatolia, to cite one blatant example, could not fit any aruz meter.) This incongruity caused two anomalous situations: it forced poets to distort the pronunciation of hundreds of Turkish words in order to fit them into the molds of the meters and to borrow in huge numbers Persian and Arabic words with long vowels. The prosody afforded definite rhythms and predetermined euphonic structures which, as pleasing to the ear as they certainly are, can become repetitious and tedious to the point where the substance is virtually subjugated to the meter. Forms. Divan poetry also used the major verse forms of Persian and Arabic literatures: gazel, the lyric ode, with a minimum of five and a maximum of fifteen couplets (aa / ba / ca / da / ea); kaside (often used for the panegyric, with the same rhyme pattern as the gazel, but running as long as thirty-three to ninety-nine couplets); mesnevi (self -rhyming couplets by the hundreds or thousands used for narratives or didactic works); rubai (the quatrain a / a / b / a expressing a distilled idea); tuyuğ(a quatrain utilizing a specific aruz meter); şarkı (originally called murabba, often used for lyrics of love and levity); and musammat (extended versions of many of the other basic verse forms). Form vesus Content. Form reigned supreme over Divan poetry. Content, most Divan poets felt, should be the self -generating substance whose concepts and values were not to be questioned, let alone renovated. As in the case of the performance of classical music in the West, craftsmanship was creative artistry, virtuosity was virtue. Achievements. Despite the tyranny of form, which even forced on the poet the requirement that each poetic statement be contained within the couplet or distich and that a static metaphorical system be regenerated with such sets of conceptual congruity as gül, the rose representing the beautiful sweetheart, and the bülbül, the distraught nightingale symbolizing the eloquent poet in love, prominent Divan poets attained a profound spirituality, a trenchant sensitivity, an overflowing eroticism. Themes. The themes recurring in the work of the masters range f rom self- glorification to self -abnegation, from agony to ebullient joy, from fanatic abstinence to uninhibited hedonism. Islamic mysticism, as the soul’s passionate yearning to merge with God, constitutes the superstructure of much Divan poetry. Early Poets. Among the early masters of the Divan tradition are Ahmedî (d. 1413), Ahmed Pasha (d. 1497), Ahmed-i-Dâi (fourteenth–fiveteenth century), and Necatî (d. 1509). Seyhi. In the early fifteenth century, Şeyhî, a physician-poet, wrote one of the most remarkable satires of socioeconomic inequity, a verse allegory called “Harname” (The Donkey Story) in which he contrasted a starving donkey with well- fed oxen. This depiction of oxen graced by crowns was certainly courageous as satire because the target in the allegory could well be the sultan and his entourage. Fuzuli. Fuzuli, the great figure of Ottoman literature in the sixteenth century,emerged at the peak of the Ottoman Empire’s grandeur. He is the author of the mesnevi entitled Leylâ vü Mecnun(Leylā and Mejnūn), a long narrative poem of close to four thousand couplets ,that explores the philosophical implications of worldly and mystic love. Perhaps no other poet exerted as much influence as Fuzuli on the elite poetry of the succeeding few centuries. Other Classical Poets. Hayalî (d. 1557), Yahya of Taşlıca (d. 1582), Şeyhülislâm Yahya (d. 1644), and Nailî (d. 1666) achieved well-deserved renown for virtuosity, graceful lyricism, and an elegant use of the language. Baki. Baki, the great sixteenth-century poet laureate,attained wide fame for the aesthetic perfection of his secular gazels and kasides. Turkification Movement. Because Divan literature was inundated by Arabic and Persian vocabulary much of it arcane and inaccessible, some poets opted for a more dominant use of words of Turkish origin. This “re-Turkification” process received impetus from literary precedents. s. In the first half of the sixteenth century, for instance, a movement called Türki-i basit (Simple Turkish), led by Nazmi of Edirne (d. after 1554) and Mahremî of Tatavla (d. ca. 1536), advocated the use of colloquial Turkish, free of Arabic and Persian borrowings and of all Persian izafet formulations, in the classical stanzaic forms utilizing the Arabic-Persian prosody (aruz) and showed, on the strength of their large and impressive output, that success could be achieved along these lines, pointing to the emergence of an original body of “national literature.” Criticism. Ottoman elite poetry has often been criticized for being too abstract, too repetitious, and excessively divorced from society and concrete reality. Modernists in the latter part of the nineteenth century took the classical poets to task for having abandoned the mainstream of Turkish national literary tradition in favor of servile imitations of Arabic and Persian poetry. In Republican Turkey, not only the advocates of folk poetry and of modern European poetry, but also a prominent scholar of Ottoman literature, Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı (d.

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